The exact hiring system we've used for over 10 years!

If you're drowning in resumes, losing track of candidates, and having scattered hiring conversations in Slack threads, you're making hiring way harder than it needs to be.

In this game-changing episode of Automate Your Agency, Alane and Micah reveal the exact applicant tracking system they've been perfecting for over a decade—built right inside your existing project management tool (no expensive HR software required).

Here's the thing: when you have 100+ applicants, multiple interviewers, and hiring managers across different departments, a spreadsheet just doesn't cut it. You need visibility into where every candidate stands, seamless knowledge transfer between interviewers, and a way to keep great candidates warm for future roles.

Here's what you'll take away:

• The exact structure that transforms hiring chaos into an organized pipeline
• How to use AI to create interview summaries that save hours of knowledge transfer
• Why "red flags" don't mean rejection (and what to do with them instead)
• How to move great candidates between different roles without starting over

Whether you're hiring your first employee or your fiftieth, stop losing great candidates to disorganization. This episode shows you exactly how to build a professional hiring system using tools you already have—plus the AI shortcuts that make it ridiculously efficient.

Get started with our free hiring manager toolkit here.

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For more information, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai.

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Transcript

0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to Automate Your Agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips, and success stories that will help you streamline yor business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations. So, Micah, I've been thinking about our applicant tracking system that we built in ClickUp, and because we're hiring right now, so it's top of mind.

0:00:29 - (Alane): And been going to a lot of HR conferences lately and talking about how we built this and one of the.

0:00:37 - (Micah): I mean, give yourself credit. You're not just going to conferences, Alane. You are going and speaking at conferences.

0:00:45 - (Alane): I am. Thanks, Micah. It's been a lot of fun talking about AI and automation in the HR department, which is so needed because we don't usually have a lot of resources for hr.

0:00:56 - (Micah): I bet not many little girls grew up thinking, I would love to go to HR events and speak about AI in the HR department. But it is, who knew, actually, probably pretty fun.

0:01:13 - (Alane): It is. It is a lot of fun. People there have a lot of energy and are eager to implement automation in the HR field. So. So, yeah, why don't we talk about what we've built and what we build for clients too, using a project management system, one of the really cool ways we're using AI for the interview process and then a free tool that we have available.

0:01:36 - (Micah): Sounds great. And I think as. As we're going through this, I want to note that this is not a new thing that we've started doing. We have done this. We did this with Asana, with our last business. I mean, how many years ago?

0:01:50 - (Alane): Don't want to age us.

0:01:52 - (Micah): Okay. Like two weeks ago.

0:01:54 - (Alane): Yeah, no, a decade ago. Literally probably longer than 10 years. It's embarrassing. But yeah, we've been doing this for.

0:02:01 - (Micah): A while, so it works. That's. That's my point in this is this works so well that we've continued to use this process over and over and with. With every business since we started it with and with every position we've hired.

0:02:18 - (Alane): Yeah. So let's start off with what the beginning of our process is. So first we're. We're hiring somebody. We need a job description. Yeah. Step one, we're hiring and we. The way that we break it down in our project management system, we use ClickUp internally now is we create a project for that role. And sometimes we already have that project click created because we've hired that role before. But every role has its own list, is what it's called in ClickUp. That way we can keep things Organized, but they all have the same template that they're running from. And we put in the information.

0:02:57 - (Alane): What are we hiring? What's the job description? We actually have a free tool for this now too that we have available that we'll link in the comments. But build out the job description using AI to help. But also you need some human touch in there.

0:03:11 - (Micah): Yes. Please don't leave it just with AI. Yes.

0:03:14 - (Alane): And also put some of your requirements for it to build off of. So that way it still pertains to what that role is within your company. So we do that and then we have interview questions. We do a multi step interview process with different people within the organization. First off in the hr quick interview, then moves to the different hiring managers that will be a part of that role. So we need interview questions to make sure that those are accurate.

0:03:42 - (Alane): And then we also do skills assessments throughout the interview process. So we use our toolkit to help put that all together and that's the start. And then we get the job ad posted like anybody would. And we have applicants rolling in. And this is where having the applicant tracking system and the project management system helps keep everything organized and the status of each person going through the interview process.

0:04:06 - (Micah): Yes. So real quick, just for our listeners to iterate the problem or to. I, I would say just describe the problem is if you have a hundred applicants come into a position, how do you know which ones are good, which ones are bad, which ones you're keeping, what interview stage you're in, whether you want to extend an offer, whether you want to put them on a back burner. It's a lot to keep track of.

0:04:37 - (Alane): Yes. And keeping all the notes in one place, like don't use slack to conversate about somebody. We need to keep that with the candidates. So as it moves along, whoever the next person is in the hiring process can visibly see those notes.

0:04:52 - (Micah): I think that's a great point that I want to call out real quick, Alane, because you could maybe a lot of people's first thought is let's create a spreadsheet of all the people coming in, what stage they're at and all that kind of stuff. And that works. And if you're a one person show, sure. Track, track everything there. But as soon as you have hiring managers, as soon as you have other stakeholders, as soon as you have other people that are helping you manage this process, then you're going to want to collaborate a lot more than what a spreadsheet could happen could allow.

0:05:22 - (Alane): And also like you mentioned, the stages of you Know, are they in interview one? Are they in interview two? Have we sent them the skills assessment? Seeing that visibility, we use AI a part of this too, that we can dig into. So, so Micah, let's talk about the structure a little bit. Why don't you guide us on, you know, where, how we use statuses and different things for people moving along the process and that way we have visibility outside of it who, who's not managing that can see where we're at with candidates.

0:05:54 - (Micah): Yeah, so if, if you're familiar with a Kanban board style, this is typically the view type that you'd want to plug into your brain while I'm describing this. But essentially in tools like ClickUp and Monday and even Asana, you would structure it so that each column in the board is a stage in your interview process. So in ClickUp, that's going to be your task status. You could have your task status as be each a stage.

0:06:22 - (Micah): Each status would be a stage of the interview process itself. So it might be, you know, the first one might be applied and then the second one would be screening. And then if they make it through screening, first interview, second interview, team interview, skills assessment, culture, fit what, whatever stages you have in your interview process. And then it generally ends with, you know, back burner, not qualified, extend, offer, accepted offer, et cetera.

0:06:54 - (Micah): So you have essentially a Kanban board and every card in that board is one applicant. And so when you're looking at this, you can directly see where is every applicant in this process?

0:07:07 - (Alane): And one way. So it depends on how people are doing their hiring process. But the start of this can look slightly different depending on how you do hiring in your organization. One is that you don't move people into this workflow until you reviewed them. And only the people that you want to move along in the process gets put in. So depends on where people are applying. If you're using indeed, and people are applying within that platform, you can just pull out the people that you want to move into the first step of the interview process.

0:07:38 - (Alane): There's another way that we, that we build this for clients is they apply with a Monday ClickUp or Asana form and you can upload a resume, you can upload a cover letter, all of that. So the review process might live in the project management system totally fine using the form. When people fill that out, that's going to automatically kick them in to this applicant tracking system. And then you can, just like Micah was saying, you can say unqualified and just remove them from it or, and then move along the people that you want to. So two different ways to kick them into this.

0:08:13 - (Micah): Yeah, and I do, I don't want to dive into a deep right here, Alane, but this structure provides the foundation for so much automation and AI capabilities. So just a kind of a quick teaser or idea what you just said of are they unqualified? Maybe there's very specific things that you're looking for in their requirements. Now platforms like indeed have some of this qualification questions already put in.

0:08:41 - (Micah): But I wouldn't necessarily recommend going from a full like let's have AI review the resume and then cut everybody out that it doesn't feel good or feel like it should fit. But you know, that's, that's probably a whole topic in itself. But based on specific questions that they answered in the form, there might be some very hard passes that you could make and you could automate that.

0:09:06 - (Alane): Mm, yes. And then the knowledge transfer piece between interviewers in this process. So let's just use the example that you have three people that do the interview process. You do a quick 15, 20 minute interview at the as your first one, then it goes up to another manager. Then it goes maybe a little bit higher in the management field in management of your company. So you have three. Well, the knowledge transfer is from one interviewer to the next.

0:09:38 - (Alane): You want to make sure you're transferring that information of what you gathered in that interview to the next person. And I think this is so important because this is unpaid time. You know, this isn't billable time for your company. This is time spent between management and your HR people. You want this to be really efficient. You don't want this to be a 30 minute knowledge transfer each time this candidate moves along.

0:10:03 - (Alane): So we've come up with a really efficient way to do this and we've been running it now with some of the candidates and it just is amazing of how to use AI based on the answers in the interview and comparing it to what you're looking for in the job description.

0:10:20 - (Micah): This is actually my like new favorite thing we've been doing lately because hiring people is hard. It is not an easy thing to do. And so any way that you can make this easier, especially when there's multiple stakeholders like you're talking about Alane, for us, internally included. Right. I mean even just thinking back on ways that we did it in the past, that knowledge transfer is something like, like BO might be the person who does an initial interview or an initial screening. Awesome.

0:10:53 - (Micah): But then he has to explain to two other busy people how he felt about that, and if we have questions, then that just takes up more time. And it's only as good as the time we allot to that and the knowledge transfer and the conversation and everything. So Beau actually came up with this, and I love it. And it is the ability to say, okay, we use our toolkit and we have a job description. We also identify the red flags that we're looking for.

0:11:25 - (Micah): So. So we're looking for positives and we're looking for negatives. And then we take the transcript of an interview and we take the job description, the positives, the negatives, the red flags, and we feed all that to an AI like Claude, and we ask it to give us back a summary in a specific format. And then what BO does is take that summary from the AI and include the video that he recorded of the interview so that us as stakeholders, we can look at that and go, okay, we can skim through the video.

0:11:59 - (Micah): We can see how the applicant responds. We can see the tone, we can hear the voice inflection and the thinking that is going into it. And we can see this amazing summary that pulls quotes from the transcript that gives examples of why this person might be a great fit for it and why not, and identifies some potential red flags or concerns that we're. That we might want to look into. And it's not a pass or fail.

0:12:30 - (Micah): It is very much a. Here's. Here's some things to consider on the positive side. Here's some things to consider on the negative side. Here's a general recommendation. Here are some quotes. And it's absolutely incredible.

0:12:44 - (Alane): Yeah. And, you know, I notice this a lot in our hiring process is red flags don't mean you're not hired. Red flags could just mean you need to be trained. And we need that visibility while we're moving applicants through because we can. If it's something we can train on in a, you know, an okay amount of time, that doesn't mean the candidate is out. That just means, hey, alert you next hiring manager, that if we do hire this person, this is a gap in knowledge that we need to hire for. So you can make that decision.

0:13:17 - (Alane): But I notice this in the interview.

0:13:22 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah. And honestly, I think this is a perfect use case for AI where it's working as a tool to support our team and to do something that is not easily attainable. When, without AI to get that type of summary, that's hours of work for somebody. Like if, if Beau were to do an interview, if you or I were to do an interview, let's Be honest, you or I, and probably most of the people listening to this are not going to spend two hours writing a summary of an interview.

0:13:52 - (Alane): No, we're going to spend like 30.

0:13:54 - (Micah): Seconds, 5 seconds, or an hey, I.

0:13:57 - (Alane): Like this person here.

0:13:59 - (Micah): Yes. Yeah, that's it.

0:14:01 - (Alane): That gives us little to go off of for the next person. So we're really screwing the rest of the hiring process over, which really makes this AI part. But, I mean, I've been on the receiving end of this for the position we most recently hired on because I'm not really a strong interviewer in that part. We're hiring a developer, so I'm not a developer, so. But y' all wanted to bring me in to say, like, hey, this is who we're thinking about.

0:14:34 - (Alane): I could just skim through the notes and say, yeah, like, love this one, definitely. Or, you know what? This one little. A little too green for me. And it worked. It worked magnificently. And I love things in bullets, and it gave me bullets.

0:14:50 - (Micah): There you go. And, I mean, I was doing the same thing. I love skimming through the video to just see the reactions and understand, like, all right, you know, I don't have to be on the interview to ask those questions. Right. We have our interview process locked down so well that we know generally what kind of questions are going to be asked so we can skim through and see the reactions. It's incredible.

0:15:16 - (Alane): So a couple of the other fields that we have. So let's get to what happens next. Like, let's say we do want to hire them. If we put rejected or backburner, then they, you know, that moves it out of the hiring process. So let's talk about what happens if we do want to hire them. So we have a couple of other statuses in there that say sending offer and then another one, offer accepted or offer rejected.

0:15:39 - (Alane): And so that way we can say, okay, we've already got a candidate here that we've sent an offer to, and we're going to keep these other two candidates that we also liked just right here sizzling until we get an offer accepted. Yeah, we get the. If the offer letter gets accepted, that kicks off new employee onboarding.

0:15:57 - (Micah): It does. And I would say, even equally as important, it also gives us our task list to follow up with the people that were sizzling to say, you know, hey, we're going to keep you on the back burner. We did find somebody else, etc. But without that, it's a lot easier to just look at that and go, okay, we hired somebody. Cool. Now, let's not talk to anybody that spent their own time interviewing with us and just ignore that because we got what we wanted.

0:16:30 - (Alane): So, yeah, and we do go back to that back burner. Sometimes we're like, you know what? We need two people, not one. And so let's go back to the other great candidates that, you know, we just found somebody faster than they made it through, and that's how it worked out. So we can go back. So it's a great way to keep a backlog of people without bogging down any other system. It, you know, it's there for when you need it.

0:16:55 - (Micah): And because we made a separate project for this, it's really easy to find that back burner. We just go to the project that's named after the role. We look at the people that are in the back burner. And if you think about it, we already spent the time and the energy finding those people. So if we start there and just follow up with them, hey, still looking for, you know, a job with this role. Cool. If they're not, they're not.

0:17:20 - (Micah): But if they are, we just shortcut our way by already doing the work ahead of time to finding somebody else for that exact role that we are hiring for.

0:17:30 - (Alane): Okay, Micah, I just thought of one really other cool thing that we do in our applicant tracking is we might have a candidate going through our interview process, and they get to interview, too, and they go, wow, this is a great candidate for another role that we have.

0:17:48 - (Micah): Oh, yes.

0:17:50 - (Alane): And can easily tag the. The hiring manager for the other role and say, hey, I've got this candidate. They've got great knowledge in this, but I think they'd be super at this other role that. That you're hiring for. Take a look again. We have the AI summaries. We've got everything from their application questions to their resume, everything for that hiring manager to see for that candidate and say yes or no. Say yes. I'd love that. And then we just move that applicant to the other project for what we're hiring for is.

0:18:25 - (Alane): It's amazing and incredible because it's so smooth. We get to keep. Not every candidate is only good at that one job, and we have all these other jobs. So if we get great people coming in, then we're able to transfer them between teams when they're going through the. The process with us.

0:18:43 - (Micah): Yeah. I'm so glad you're bringing this up because, you know, if you just think about this problem, and this really speaks to teams that are growing and scaling is without Something like this. The knowledge transfer between departments is such a burden for something like this or even between hiring managers that most of the time, what we've seen in the past without something like this, or when we're working with clients that don't have this, it is, hey, Alane, I've got this applicant for you that I think might be a really good fit for the position you're hiring for.

0:19:15 - (Micah): And then Alane looks at that and goes, okay, cool, thanks a lot, Micah. And then pushes it aside because the amount of work that Alane has to go through when she already has all these other applicants to figure out what this one is, is just too much. It's too much knowledge. It's too much to look back. But with this system, all Alane has to do, it's the difference between getting like, okay, thanks a lot, but no thanks.

0:19:43 - (Alane): Right.

0:19:44 - (Micah): Versus. Oh, crap, we've got this, like, awesome summary. I can read through it and get excited about the applicant that Micah just recommended and then even just watch a video to get a feel of, you know, would this person actually be a good fit? And that can increase efficiency across teams while hiring, I don't know, fivefold, tenfold.

0:20:07 - (Alane): Infinite, Micah.

0:20:08 - (Micah): Infinite, infinite fold.

0:20:09 - (Alane): All right, last point that I wanna make on this. If you have an applicant tracking system like we're talking about when. So this happened three months ago where a candidate came in for another role. Beau came across it, did an initial interview and said, elaine, check this out. I think she'd be better on your team for another role. And I already had the job description then. That candidate doesn't know what's in your head unless you have it document.

0:20:34 - (Alane): So when Beau did that and I looked at it, I said, yes, absolutely, I need to contact that candidate and say, hey, I saw you coming across the interview process. I'd love to see if you didn't be interested in this role with the job description. It took me two minutes to contact that person. I had everything all together for that role. And if you don't. If you see a great candidate and you don't have a job description together, but you could make one for them, Use our job toolkit. Create a job description in a couple of minutes and then you're done. And you save that in the hiring process for that role and now you have something there.

0:21:11 - (Micah): Yes.

0:21:11 - (Alane): All right, so I think that wraps up as much as we're going to talk about right now for. We could go on forever, but we'll spare you. But we're going to link to our hiring toolkit in the job description. It's a free tool. You're welcome to share it, use it, and start consistently getting applicants. Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate youe Agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. Don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review.

0:21:39 - (Alane): Your feedback helps us improve and reach more listeners. If you're looking for more resources, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai for free content and tools for automating your business. Join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business. Bye for now.